https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=91886
A. Wilcox (awilfox) <awilfox at adelielinux dot org> changed:
What |Removed |Added
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CC| |awilfox at adelielinux dot org
--- Comment #25 from A. Wilcox (awilfox) <awilfox at adelielinux dot org> ---
(In reply to rsand...@gcc.gnu.org from comment #21)
> But it was a mistake made by the GCC developers. Once something
> is documented publicly, we shouldn't just remove it without
> warning unless there's no realistic alternative. And it sounds
> from what Jakub says like it's simple to keep this working.
Thank you for being the voice of reason :) There is no reason to break a
public interface when it is a one-liner to fix. At the *very* least, it would
allow more time for discussion with musl and LLVM developers and other
interested parties.
(In reply to Segher Boessenkool from comment #23)
> I will not add back all constraints I removed.
Nobody here has asked for all constraints to be re-added. Only one, which was
publicly documented for years, and used in real code.
> The point is that we will never get to a good state if we cannot fix
> up any historical mistakes.
GCC typically announces deprecations for publicly-documented interfaces being
removed versions ahead of time, and I'm surprised that wasn't followed here.
Then a discussion could have taken place on if the deprecated interfaces were
still needed, ways to refactor to make it less of a maintenance burden in the
meantime, ways to move forward without breaking existing code, and so on.
It is disturbing to me that "fixing up historical mistakes" appears to mean
that GCC developers can just yank out public interfaces with no notice. I do
not think this is what the community wants in a system compiler.
> supports old POWER, never mind that no one ever uses that any more.
I'm still using 970s daily. IBM's ppc64 kernel CI got a "new" G5 last year.
ZTE (Chinese telecom) uses POWER6. Older POWER is definitely still used.
